Tag Archives: flying saucer

September 3rd used to have a reputation of being a day of weird shit (see Almanac entry), and the North East England village of Fencehouses, near Houghton-le-Spring, appears to have some affinity with this date and UFOs. If I’d been planning ahead, I might have gone there tonight… or maybe not. I’ve seen the place by daylight – the thought of it after dark does not appeal.

“On Friday the 3rd of September 2010, me and my partner were on our way to Houghton from Chester Le Street and coming through Fencehouses, when we saw a red ball in the sky. At first I thought it was Mars but it looked odd and before our eyes, it changed to orange. It gave the appearance of being very far away, but then all of a sudden we drove under it and that was that…”

This is interesting, because On September 3, 1976 an elderly woman and her eighteen year old niece saw a grounded UFO at Fencehouses. It was a small object, about three-and-a-half feet by five feet, with a smooth glassy surface that the older woman says she touched. On top was a small orange dome, and it was sitting on sledge-like runners of steel or chrome. The witnesses were attracted towards it and appeared to enter a hypnotic state where time stood still. They met two tiny beings with long hair, but no communication ensued. They then lost all sense of time, and the object shot upwards making a humming noise.

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This account is interesting if you subscribe to the theory that the UFOnauts of today are the Fairy Folk of yesteryear with an updated image. If that was the case, the Fencehouses entities almost seem to be in the process of metamorphing from one state to the other – tiny beings and the UFO on sledge-like runners.

And a small orange dome… related in any way to the red / orange ball in the 2010 account ?

Fencehouses is about 7 or 8 miles from where I sit writing this. I once mentioned the close encounter to a woman who came from the village – she was aghast: “What the hell did they want to go there for ?” – her point of view being that if you had the travel opportunities that a UFO afforded, Fencehouses would be a very long way down the list of desirable locations to visit, and I must agree she had a point. The UFOs evidently like it, though.

I once worked for a couple of months with the infamous Bird Man of Fencehouses. But that’s another tale altogether…